Research Methods in Literary Studies
Table of Contents
All Research Is Discipline-Specific! #
Some aims, questions, and methods make sense within the context of some disciplines but not in others. For instance, in literature we generally don’t do data collection or statistical analysis, we don’t articulate testable hypotheses, and we don’t write literature reviews. As the Greek philosopher Aristotle once observed, “it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.”
It is therefore very important that before you start research you have a clear idea of what kind of research you are doing. In literary studies your primary focus should be the literary text itself and, if you wish, some aspect of its social and intellectual context. Your secondary sources should also come from appropriate disciplines: you should use primarily literary criticism and theory and occasionally, depending on your topic, you can borrow concepts from other adjacent disciplines (e.g. philosophy, psychology, or political theory), and you may want to introduce historical scholarship to attend to the work’s context. However, when it comes to literary studies, it is usually a sign that something is not right with a paper’s research focus if it cites primarily sociological or psychological literature on ‘real world’ issues.
Literary Texts Are Open to Interpretation #
Because there generally isn’t a single definite interpretation of any literary text, as scholars of literature we must be open to a certain degree of indeterminacy. This doesn’t mean that anything goes (we still must give evidence for what we argue) but it does mean that any literary text will be open to more than one plausible interpretation. Your task in most literature papers will therefore be to articulate an interpretation of a text (or some aspect of it) and to provide evidence, based on your own insights, and insights of existing scholarship, for that interpretation.
What Do We Study When We Study Literature? #
As you have learned by now, there is a great variety of approaches to the study of literary texts. Some approaches focus on the analysis of purely formal elements (verse or narrative perspective) without really focusing on interpretation, some focus on textual interpretation without any reference to its context, and some seek to interpret the text in relation to a particular social or ideological context (for instance, in relation to gender roles or politics). For the sake of convenience, approaches to literary text can be divided into intrinsic and extrinsic, although reality is, of course, much murkier.
Intrinsic Approaches #
The focus is on the internal structure of a literary work which is generally approached as an isolated object of study. We may explore the use of symbolism, metrical patterns, style, or narrative perspective.
For example:
- The use of narrative perspective in Joyce and Woolf
- Symbolism of thunder in the poetry of T.S. Eliot
- Dramatic structure in the tragedies of Shakespeare and Marlowe
Extrinsic Approaches #
The focus is on the connection between the literary work and some aspect of the work’s ’external’ context (contemporary social reality, dominant ideology, author’s biography and psychology)
For example:
- Antisemitism in the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Gender roles in traditional fairytales
- A Marxist analysis of class struggle in contemporary fiction
Points to Note! #
Extrinsic approaches are not to be confused with either sociological analysis or social activism. The purpose of extrinsic analysis is to understand a literary work’s relationship to the social context, it is not to describe or solve a social problem, however serious the problem might be. An appropriate topic of this type will focus on how a literary text addresses a particular underlying issue or how it is conditioned by it. For example, in what way Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Annie John interrogates gender roles? A good research paper on this topic should tell us what is particularly interesting or complicated in how the novel portrays gender and if that portrayal is in some way shaped by, for instance, the colonial context to which it belongs. The purpose of a research paper in literature is neither to argue that something is a serious social problem (for example, gender inequality, child abuse, or racism) nor to offer solutions. It is also not enough to argue that a particular text has a progressive or reactionary stance on a particular issue. In short, an analysis of a literary work should not serve as a mere pretext to talk about some socially significant issue.
How to Find a Topic #
Whether approach you choose, your focus should be on some interesting question/problem about your text.
You Should Always Think About Your Topic as a Response to Some Question Worth Pondering! #
Ask yourself: what is worth illuminating about this particular text or texts?
For example, is there anything interesting about the way the author of a novel uses narrative perspective? Are there meaningful connections between some literary text and some philosophical or anthropological theory that warrant further scrutiny? Is the text responding to some particular social development and what is interesting about that response? Have you noticed that two texts treat a similar topic but with a different focus or using different techniques? Is the text playing with genre conventions in some interesting way?
Examples of Well-Articulated Topics (I) #
Art making and art viewing activities steeped in assumptions about gender recur throughout Jane Eyre and Villette. This paper will argue that Charlotte Bronte developed these fine arts devices as part of a carefully crafted feminist critique of spectatorship and representation.
Jane Kromm, “Visual Culture and Scopic Custom in Jane Eyre and Villette,” Victorian Literature and Culture 26.2 (1998)
Examples of Well-Articulated Topics (II) #
Dickens’ decision to represent Oliver Twist as incorruptible has exposed both author and character to considerable abuse. Exactly why did Dickens pursue such а strategy? I will argue that Dickens represents his hero as morally immune from the effects of his brutal childhood environment because of an acute anxiety about the ability of the bourgeois hearth to inculcate а moral regimen sufficient to withstand the threats and solicitations lurking beyond what the author wished to imagine as the charmed circle of Victorian domesticity. This anxiety, far from being peculiar to Dickens, is mandated by the very structure of nineteenth-century middle-class discourses of domestic pedagogy. Thus what I hope to achieve is not so much а revelation of Dickens’ personal psychology as а demonstration of how certain contradictions within bourgeois ideology create, in Oliver Twist, а protagonist and а narrative in conflict with each other and—at times—with the formal requirements of the novel as а genre.
Cates Baldridge, “The Instabilities of Inheritance in Oliver Twist,” Studies in the Novel 25.2 (1993)
But Where Do I Start? #
Once you have identified an issue you are interested in, you should explore what has already been said on the topic. The world doesn’t start with you, you are likely joining an ongoing conversation!
Research Process #
- Think of a topic
- Do primary research
- Explore existing literature
- Refine your topic
Engagement with Existing Scholarship #
When you are writing a research paper you are usually not starting from scratch. In other words, someone has probably written something on the topic you are addressing, and it is a part of your job to engage this previous work. You need to explain how your work fits with what has been said before on your topic, and how your work challenges, confirms, or advances existing scholarship. For instance, you might want to say something like: “so far, scholars have mostly analyzed this novel as an example of postcolonial literature, but in this essay I argue why such an approach is inadequate.” Or you might say something like this: “existing scholarship has done much to illuminate the role of antisemitism in Dostoevsky’s writings. In this essay I wish to draw on the work of scholars X, Y, Z in order to further emphasize how antisemitism complicated Dostoevsky’s use of narrative perspective.” The purpose of such statements is to situate your work in relation to existing scholarship and to tell the reader what is new, relevant, or important about your contribution.
Below are two examples of how you can situate your work in relation to what has been said before about your subject. What both of these examples are saying is basically this: existing scholarship has gotten something wrong about the books in question or has overlooked/ignored something important about them and this essay aims to correct those oversight by performing the necessary analysis.
Example 1
Critical investigations of the foreign settings of Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor (written 1846, published 1857) and Villette (1853) have tended to conceive Belgium (fictionalized as Labassecour in Villette) as simply “not England.” Terry Eagleton, for example, argues that the foreign settings of Brontë’s fiction represent “a blank surface on to which private fantasies may be feverishly projected,” while Sally Shuttleworth characterizes Labassecour in Villette as “an alien culture.” This reluctance to consider the particular significance of Belgium in Brontë’s fiction may stem in part from an overreliance on the author’s biography: critics tend to assume that Brontë set The Professor in Belgium because she lived in Brussels from 1842 to 1843. more significant, however, this failure to consider Belgium’s cultural role is also symptomatic of a recent tendency in literary criticism to overlook Britain’s interactions with continental Europe, in favor of its relationship with empire—as James Buzard points out in Disorienting Fiction. Like Buzard, I contend that Brontë’s fiction is characterized by a concern for both Britain’s Continental and colonial relationships: Brontë presents British national identity as a product of this “triangulat[ion]”, and not merely a result of empire building. In this essay I thus consider the historic and geographic specificity of The Professor and Villette, arguing that Victorian attitudes toward Belgium have key implications for our understanding of the conception of Britishness in Brontë’s fiction.
Anne Longmuir, “‘Reader, perhaps you were never in Belgium?’: Negotiating British Identity in Charlotte Brontë's The Professor and Villette,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, 64.2 (2009)
Example 2
(…) Several influential scholars –– most notably Amanda Anderson and Kwame Anthony Appiah –– have turned to Daniel Deronda as an example of a cosmopolitanism free of pernicious hegemonic connotations, a cosmopolitanism understood as a commitment to open exchange between nations and races, rather than as the erasure of all cultural difference. In doing so they have, however, simultaneously overextended the concept of cosmopolitanism, rendering it very nearly meaningless, and misjudged the politics of Eliot’s novel, overlooking its deep commitment to the logic of ethnic nationalism. In this essay I wish to use what I take to be the dual failure — interpretative and theoretical — of recent readings of Daniel Deronda in order to reexamine both the politics of Eliot’s late writings and the ways in which we use the concept of cosmopolitanism in our critical practice.
Aleksandar Stevic, “Convenient Cosmopolitanism: Daniel Deronda, Nationalism, and the Critics,” Victorian Literature and Culture 45.3 (2017)